HEALOHA JOHNSTON

Director of Cultural Resources, and Curator for Hawaiʻi
Pacific Arts and Culture
Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum

Healoha Johnston lives in Kaiwiki, Hawai‘i, and is director of Cultural Resources and curator for Hawaiʻi and Pacific Arts and Culture at Bishop Museum, where she is lead curator for the museum’s Pacific Pipeline Initiative. Johnston’s research and exhibitions explore connections between historic visual culture and contemporary art, with a particular focus on the sociopolitical underpinnings that inform those relationships. Her curated exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art include Ho‘oulu Hawai‘i: The King Kalākaua Era (2018–2019), for which the accompanying exhibition catalog received multiple awards including the 2019 Samuel M. Kamakau Book of the Year Award from the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association; and Lisa Reihana: Emissaries (2019), an exhibition that, for the first time, brought together the groundbreaking video iPOV [infected] and telescope installation with the complete set of French nineteenth-century wallpapers that Reihana critically recast. Recent exhibitions at Bishop Museum include Project Banaba (2023) and Corned Beef & Kalo (2024).